Label:
Thrill Jockey
Release Date:
17/09/2007

To start with the songs that feature on this EP were plain. Non-kit percussion, standard; carnival whistles, standard; Gang Gang chants, standard. Yoshimi P-We's artistic sideline sounded just how I thought they'd sound, naturalism coming naturally to OOIOO; tribal, primal, ecstatic. Then Yoshimi summoned fellow Boredom Yamantaka Eye into the studio to remix 'UMO' and _'UMA', gave the new material precedence and released this: the most annoying record I've ever heard.

Possibly. For Eye has undeniably done his job well - the war-dance, tub-tub drumming from the original tracks has been ditched, or at least relegated to the background, the choice being to extract instead the most annoying part and queue-jump it to the front of the mix. The result is Woolworths in my headphones,
sticky-faced toddlers screaming for Bratz or chocolate or whatever the fuck it is that children want these days. Eye easily achieves a type of psychedelica through sensory battery.

The four tracks here fall into the rapidly filling 'tribal' tent - OOIOO, albeit, a tribe I'd like to sneak up on and massacre in their sleep - drums looping like tides and vocals screaming or wailing to sky-bound deities. What they're wailing, I don't know, I don't speak Japanese. This combination of the familiar and the unknown is disorientating, adding to the headache provided by Yoshimi's throat. It's formidably good at what it does: his battery acid mix flails, skitters and vomits like a six-year-old nauseous with thwarted toy-lust; her voice, in pitch, tone, rhythm and volume, grates irresistibly up my spinal chord.

In these terms the EP is a masterpiece, artistry in irritation. So, for achieving its aims, this gets an art-rock 10 and, for the loops, the chants and the tub-tubs, a subjective 3. Reasonably, we should finish somewhere in the middle.